Gauging Progress is a tough thing to do for a new blog and one of the hardest things for you to do when a blog is only ten days old.  it is even harder to gauge the progress than it is to attract visitors.  None the less you need to do it, just as much as you need to attract new visitors every day.  Let’s take a look at Meme Connection again.

• Since the blog went online we have dropped our Alexa number 3.2M and that is down from 3.5 on Sunday when I checked it last and down from 7.5M on the first.  i think I may well meet the goal I set of under 1M by the end of the month at this rate if I keep it up.
• Google has been good to us as well.  For the unquoted terms meme and connection the site or sites linking to Meme Connection carry nine of the top ten slots.  For a site that went online fifteen days ago that is pretty impressive even if the terms aren’t well searched, since there are 6.5M search results.
• Google Analytics says my visitors thus far are 55% referring traffic, 34% direct traffic, 8% search traffic, and the rest is made up of other and I have no idea what “other” actually constitutes.  I do know however that a large amount of the total traffic comes from sites looking at my profile.  I also know that a large amount of direct traffic is from twitter, or more precisely from the Twhirl client, which registers as direct rather than referring for some reason.  I have seen this happen on other sites using both Google Analytics and other real time metrics programs.

Things I still need to is spend more time commenting on other blogs and putting the name out there.  I need to find new members willing to create or submit memes.  Lastly I need to keep doing more of what I am doing and researching keywords to use in google that will rank well for Google.

For the record contributors who sign up you get a profile with live links and post links.  i do visit every link and those who put up spam crap can expect to find themselves site banned.

I was asked recently how to get a 1000 visitors a day to your blog network.  If you have a network it is quite easy.  The more blogs you have the more content you have, and more content you have the better chance you will get hits from search results.  Here is my quick list of do’s and don’ts.

• Content isn’t enough.  You need content with good keywords and for that material to be indexed.  If you run a wordpress blog the Google XML Sitemap Plugin is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for getting indexed.  If you want to be properly indexed it is highly important that you use good content specific keywords and tags.  I generate specific keywords with Wordsfinder and use the Calais Tagaroo Plugin to generate Semantic tags, both of which appear as meta keywords to search engines thanks to my theme.
• Write about popular things.  If you follow the first rule of good tagging and and getting regularly indexed, writing about popular topics is going to greatly increase your traffic.  While it goes without saying that writing about football in the off season isn’t going to bring you a lot of traffic for those posts, when I say popular I mean really popular.  The Google Trends page is your friend if you learn to read it correctly.  At any given time these are the 100 most popular search terms on Google and they all have links to recent blog posts through Google Blog links.  Incorporate something from here and your search traffic will go up.  Mention sixty or seventy of them over a couple of relevant posts and you are search gold for as long as the trend continues.
• Write something worth shouting about.  If your posts are pretty good there is always someone willing to submit it to the Social Media outlets.  Promoting yourself is held by some as being tacky and rude, but I don’t think so under some circumstances.  if you aren’t the only one you are promoting.  if you submit, comment, stumble, and rate hundreds of pages a week a little self promotion isn’t a bad thing.  Once a page has been submitted by someone else there is no reason not to jump on the promotion bandwagon.  If you put up a couple of stumble worthy pages a day your traffic can easily exceed a thousand hits a day.
• Comment on popular blogs in your niche.  I can’t begin to tell you how many thousands upon thousands of visitors this can bring to your blog.  This is a long term strategy that has to be cultivated and worked over time.  You need to leave relevant comments on these blogs and do it often.  One good comment will likely get you some traffic, but a hundred comments on a popular blog a year or more is golden.
• Give people a reason to come back.  Unless you are giving your people a reason to come back they likely aren’t going to.  There are lots of good sources of the same information you are providing so you need to give people a reason to return.  I use CommentLuv, KeywordLuv, Nofollow Free, plugins and interact with the people that comment.  Some of my blogs I offer an integrated forum so readers can interact with each other.
• Make it easy for people to come back.  Not only do you need to give people a reason to come back, you need to make it easy for them to return. (I need to do a better job of this on this theme.)  You can do things like put a Del.Icio.us, Technorati,  Yahoo as well as rss feed or many other buttons that make getting back to you easy for people to return.

When you are first deciding on online marketing in order to promote your business online, the main online marketing methods that you will encounter are Organic search engine optimisation and Pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords.

Organic search engine optimisation and Pay pr click advertising are the two main methods of online marketing.  Both these forms of online marketing are aimed at getting highly targeted visitors to your website by making your website rank on search engine results for the keywords that you are targeting.

Ideally a business needs to utilise both, organic Search engine optimisation as well as Pay per click advertising on order to get the maximum exposure for their business online. However cost and budget considerations often result in a business having to make a choice between using organic search engine optimisation or Pay per click advertising for their business.

Before discussing which form of online marketing is better for your business, it is important to understand the difference between organic search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising. Organic search engine optimisation refers to the search results that appear in the main centre section of the search results. Ranking within organic search engine results cannot be bought and ranking is a result of organic non-biased steps taken over a period of time.  It is dependent on the overall popularity of your website on the internet in general among other on site factors. Organic listings are the results that appear in the main section of a search engine such as Google when we search for something. Pay per click advertising on the other hand refers to the paid listing or sponsored results that appear on the right of the search results page and not in main middle section of the page.

Pay per click result is paid for and results are almost immediate to achieve. However there are many drawbacks to pay per click advertising as compared with Organic search engine optimisation. The recent years have seen an exponential rise in competition and a steep rise in pay per click costs. Click fraud is another rising concern in pay per click advertising where an advertiser may be charged for clicks that are not by genuine customers.

1)      Many surveys and search engine marketing studies have pointed than users are more likely to click on organic search results that appear on the main section of the page rather than the paid listings that appear as ads on the right.

Just when I thought my LJ Blog was just a cross post repository for my other blogs so my friends could keep in touch with what I am doing along comes the a surprising number of Google hits to The Other Blog and I find that they are being directed from my LJ which had this nice hand slot of second position in an Idol Results search. The post wasn’t an hour old and who knows by the number of hits, 60 in a matter of minutes, I might have been the top slot for a bit. As means of drawing traffic to your blog, cross posting and staying in touch with you friends in these communities can certainly be to your benefit.

There are two really great programs that I am familiar and associated with BlogMad and BlogExplosion. You earn traffic to your site by surfing the sites they feed you. This is where writing good content and catchy post titles will really pay off. A person has to have your site up for 25 seconds in BlogMad and 30 seconds in BlogExplosion. before they can move on.

In my opinion if you want to start earning mad traffic you should join them both. you can easily surf through a lot of blogs while you you are watching TV or Listening to music and if you are a multitasker like th two computers at your desk there is no reason why you can’t always have a browser window open just for these sites. You won’t give a damn about most of the sites that you see, but some times you will see something that makes you go wow and that is worth the time spent. If you feel you must pick one of the two I would say go with BlogMad. BlogMad Favorites can be directed to your Del.icio.us account which makes sharing what you find a lot easier and as a source of future posts. You can find more on my use of social networking sites such as Del.icio.us and twitter for content creation in an upcoming post. General use of social networking to increase traffic in part three of this series.

You can have the coolest blog layout and even more impressive content, but without readers it is merely a vanity project.

We all want lots of Google traffic because as everyone knows it is king of the search engines. The fact is when you are a noob Google traffic is going to be hard to come by unless you did something really stupid and have your blog associated with it. Having a podcast of you and your sister doing it on the desk would probably get you noticed. Frankly if she is hot enough that you want to fuck her and she is horny enough not to care about incest good for you both, That will likely get you noticed, but it won’t get you the kind of traffic you want in all likelyhood. Face it you are a noob. you need to worry about the technical aspects of getting listed on Google, but you should not worry about if your traffic is coming from their. Get your traffic in play and Google will eventually pick up on you.

So where does that leave you to get it?

1) Use free link exchanges like the one I have listed here.

2)Post to You Comment I Follow blogs with relevant comments. I do mean relevant, nothing pisses off your fellow bloggers like posting inane babble on their hard work. Read the post and comment appropriately.

3) Keep writing good copy.